COMPLEXITY AND LIFE: TESSERACTS AND THE “BUTTERFLY EFFECT”

“The film examines four seemingly unconnected lives brought together through a theft in a Bangkok hotel room. The interactions of an English drug dealer, a British psychologist, a Thaiassassin, and an abused 13-year old boy demonstrate that life is so complex that even the smallest events can have enormous, even fatal consequences (i.e. the butterfly effect).”

Storyline

In Bangkok, in a low-budget hotel called “Heaven”, the fate of four guests are interconnected due to a theft in a room: Sean, a paranoid English drug dealer, that is dealing with a powerful local drug lord; the also British psychologist Rosa, who is grieving the loss of her son and making a research with poor children in Thailand; a seriously wounded killer, hired to kill the mobster; and Wit, a thirteen years old abused bellboy, that steals the guests.

In the end, we see that it is almost impossible to control life, and sometimes, a subtle incident may lead to fatality.

The film examines four seemingly unconnected lives brought together through a theft in a Bangkok hotel room. The interactions of an English drug dealer, a British psychologist, a Thaiassassin, and an abused 13-year old boy demonstrate that life is so complex that even the smallest events can have enormous, even fatal consequences (i.e. the butterfly effect).

Plot

Sean, a runner for a drug gang, has checked into room 303 at the seedy, rundown Heaven Hotel in Bangkok, to await arrival of a package of heroin. Another guest is Rosa, psychologist who is researching slum children, on the floor below (room 202). In the next room, 203, is Lita, a female assassin who is waiting to intercept the package Sean is waiting for. Tying them all together, is the 13-year-old bellboy, Wit, a streetwise, light-fingered kid.

In geometry, the tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of 6 square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of 8 cubical cells. The tesseract is one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes.

A generalization of the cube to dimensions greater than three is called a “hypercube“, “n-cube” or “measure polytope“. The tesseract is the four-dimensional hypercube, or 4-cube.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word tesseract was coined and first used in 1888 by Charles Howard Hinton in his book A New Era of Thought, from the Greek “τέσσερεις ακτίνες” (“four rays”), referring to the four lines from each vertex to other vertices. Some people have called the same figure a tetracube, and also simply a hypercube (although the term hypercube is also used with dimensions greater than 4).

Madeleine L’Engle in the science fiction-fantasy novel A Wrinkle In Time uses a tesseract as a way of traveling. The easiest way to understand how a tesseract would help with travel is by analogy. Imagine a two dimensional creature, stuck on the surface of a three dimensional cube. Traveling across the surface of the cube would take more time than cutting through the center of the cube, as a three dimensional creature might. Traveling by “tesser” or “wrinkling” allows the children of the book to be transported to places unreachable by normal means of travel.

A tesseract is the basis of the movie Cube 2: Hypercube in which a group of people have to attempt to escape from one.

Others, however, have used the word as a shorthand for something strange or unknown without any reference to the actual figure, as in Alex Garland‘s novel The Tesseract.

·HyperSolids is an open source program for the Apple Macintosh (Mac OS X and higher) which generates the five regular solids of three-dimensional space and the six regular hypersolids of four-dimensional space.